Changes to Duxbury’s National Honor Society

By: Carlin H.

Duxbury High School’s National Honor Society will be making changes to their admission process beginning this year.

The confirmed change for this year is an interview added onto the application process. “The idea of the interview process is to allow us to look more deeply into all four pillars of National Honor Society,” said Ms. Coleman. These pillars are scholarship, leadership, service, and character.

Students like junior Amanda K. believe that this change will be helpful because “the teachers should have a chance to get to know they types of students that they are accepting in and get a good idea of what type of person they are and how they’re going to act in the future.”

Other proposed changes include increasing the GPA requirement from the current 3.5 weighted GPA. “For the class of 2019, there will be no change to the GPA requirement,” said Ms. Coleman. The GPA is concerning because, “our actual requirement is a 3.5 out of a 4.0 [unweighted]. If you do a proportion… that works out to be a 3.7 out of a 4.2, which is our weighted GPA scale, so we’re not meeting our minimum requirement written into our bylaws… because we are using the weighted average,” said Ms. Coleman.

In other school systems, this GPA requirement is higher. For example, in Hingham, students need to have a cumulative 3.7 out of 4.0 GPA.

Hingham’s GPA requirements as written into their bylaws. Photo taken from the Hingham High School webpage.

Because of the low GPA requirement, “Routinely, almost 50% of the class qualifies to be in National Honor Society because we’re using a weighted 3.5 out of 4.2 scale,” said Ms. Coleman. “With such a large number of students in National Honor Society, it is hard to be as productive as we would like,” said Ms. Radzik.

Some students believe that the changes will be helpful. “I think [the proposed changes] are a great idea because it would make it harder to get into the National Honor Society,” said junior Melissa L. “I think a lot of kids just want to join the community service organizations to check a box but in reality they are really organizations that require your commitment and require real community service hours and require that students really care about the organization and what they are doing to support the school community.”

With all of these changes, it is important to remember that “The purpose of the National Honor Society is to recognize the kids who are truly exceptional at Duxbury High School,” said the advisors Ms. Coleman and Ms. Radzik. Ms. Dembowski also agreed that National Honor Society should highlight those students at the top of their class. “We place a very high value on NHS,” said Ms. Dembowski. Though students think, “it’s an organization that they have to belong to… that is not the case…That one thing will not make or break a student getting into a college.”

Current juniors looking to ace their interview can look at the Duxbury High School’s handbook. This includes the four pillars of excellence that will guide the interview. To check out the timeline of application deadlines, students can visit the National Honor Society page here.